Thank you all for 2017!

[Marindor]

Thank you all for 2017!

Dear Humans and Elves,

2017 is coming to an end and for us here on Elvenar Beta, it has been an interesting and exciting year in many ways. Looking back at the last 12 months makes us realize how much can happen in just a year. Let's recap together!

January
We started the year off with some changes to our Tournament system, making it a Fellowship feature instead of something that depended on your neighbours. Also, the Banshee unit was introduced and after reconsidering player feedback on a previous change for the Wholesaler, we changed it to the way it currently is, making the amounts of goods you can get, depend on your Main Hall level. At the end of January we started Beta-testing our Valentine Questline Event. Who remembers Burburak and his beloved Gaelagil Riverrun?

February
The Sorcerers & Dragons made their introduction as a Guest Race in February this year! In response to a lot of player feedback, we also made some huge improvements in the AI for battles and we increased the strength of player units for low chapter players, so battles became more attractive early in the game. For us here at Beta, another major change was made in February as well with our shift to daily game updates. This system has its challenges (now every day things can break, for example ) and we will never be able to prevent all bugs from hitting Live but we've significantly improved in Beta-only bugs compared to 2016. What we still want to improve on, is the number of bugs that got fixed on Beta but somehow still reaches our Live release.

The loading screens also got an overhaul and while many players like(d) the previous ones better, they are now more in line with the images we use on a world wide basis for marketing purposes. Maybe less visible but not less valuable: In February we hired several Wiki moderators, increasing the speed with which new content gets added to our Wiki. At the end of the month, we brought some balancing changes to our tournaments, reducing the number of encounters per province and adding more diversity in rewards. Minor improvements this month included adding tooltips for city expansions and visual improvements to questgiver portraits and reward screens.

March
March brought us our new Easter Event: 'Rise of the Phoenix'. Further improvements were also made to the AI behaviour and we made some minor improvements, like adding information about street connections to tooltips and faster loading times on the World Map. Our forum got a new skin as well, making it more user friendly for mobile devices. At the end of the month a start was made with the big Ancient Wonder rebalancing.

April
We finished our Ancient Wonder rebalancing, making the effects of the Ancient Wonders depend on your city development. This means that while your city grows, the power of the Ancient Wonders does as well so they keep their value over time. Minor improvements this month included the adding of Workshop and Manufactory production names to their tooltips and AI changes to the behaviour of Hellhounds and Cerberi towards Mage units.

May
May started off with the Menhirok's Duty QLE. We implemented transparency to buildings while in moving them and thanks to te help of our Beta players we were able to tackle a major bug around trades before it would hit our Live servers. May was also a very important month for us, with the release of our mobile app in the UK app stores as our first test market! In May we also got company from our next Guest Race: The Halflings!

June
The 'Charming Tree' QLE made its introduction in June, as did our big Summer Event: 'March of the Herds'. Other than that, no big things really happened this month. We got some minor improvements, e.g. some visual improvements, more information in the rankings menu and preparations for the new inventory.

July
July brought Instants to the game! Furthermore, we added diamonds to tech tree chests and as a reward for some storyline quests. We also added difficulty indicators to World Map provinces and we slightly altered the number of required provinces to open some of the tech tree chests.

August
August was quite an eventful month for us and it sometimes feels like we're still recovering from it For the first time in Elvenar history we introduced a QLE with a mana producing reward building and one that consisted of 2 parts, with The Masquerade parts 1 & 2. Well, that was the planning but our new Multiplayer Event 'Fellowship Adventures' was ready for Beta testing as well, so we had to postpone The Masquerade part 2 in order to give more room to Beta testing the brand new game mechanics of the FA. This (also for the first time ever) resulted in us launching a QLE on Beta after the Live release. Still, we wanted to give our Beta players a chance to win the reward building if they wanted to. It turned out to be a good call to give priority to the FA, because this month we got the most bug reports in Elvenar history! Our number of support tickets exploded as well, resulting in 3-4 times the number of usual support tickets! Still, our support team did great, handling all the bug reports swiftly and replying to our support requests in less than 2 hours on average. The answers in august were rated with an average rating of 4.4 out of 5 stars, which is incredible when the workload is this high

In August we also introduced our new ingame News Window, allowing us to communicate with our players better without having these annoying popups in the game all the time. It also makes it possible for us to reach our players who don't regularly visit our forums, which is a huge improvement. Fellowship Adventures got their first optimizations right after receiving the first Beta Feedback. This month we also hired a few extra QA Moderators to have a bigger buffer in case another busy month would pop up.

September
After finally launching The Masquerade part 2, it was time to go to our next big event: 'Eldrasil's Ascending'. This new Autumn Event was received with enthousiasm. Players loved the graphics and the fact that 'double sprout days' made it possible for them to reach all Grand Prizes without using diamonds. When the Flourishing Nutcave building didn't work as intended and we had to alter the values afterwards, not everyone was equally happy but all in all the player feedback on the event was good.

Some minor improvements this month included visual improvements, the display of more notifications and a new icon for Enchantments. The Crystal Lighthouse and the Great Bell Spire Ancient Wonders got a change in their mechanics. Instead of giving a small amount of goods for each NH, from now on they give bigger amounts of goods but only for each NH chest that is openened.

October
In October we introduced our Halloween QLE with Crush helping us defeat Lord Pumpkin's army of undead. FA rankings were added to the Rankings menu and new event buildings you've won, are now labeled as 'new'. We also implemented a notification for received Ancient Wonder rewards. And last but certainly not least: We launched our mobile app in the first batch of app store markets, with the rest following on November 1st!

November
November started with the world wide release of our mobile app! The rest of the month stayed relatively quiet. Behind the screens we were mainly working on future preparations, while on our forums the requests for a next Guest Race became bigger and bigger. A small addition we made in November, was the implementation of extra forum smilies in Elvenar style The month ended with the Beta Launch of this year's Winter Event: Three Glacier Giants. This event introduced a brand new game mechanic: Set Buildings, which give extra boosts/bonuses when placed adjacent to each other.

December
As is often the case, December has been a relatively quiet month so far. We made some balancing changes to orc-producing and mana-producing event buildings, making them more valuable on the levels on which they're not yet able to produce their intended resources. Also the Winter Event is still running, while in the office we are working hard on getting the next Guest Race ready and optimizing the browser version of our game.

Nice to know
Now please let us share some general things with you. This year on Beta we handled over 2500 support requests/tickets. This is about 1000 support tickets less than in 2016, but the funny thing is that our number of active players compared to last year slightly increased. On Beta we have quite a big core of active and dedicated players of which we are very proud Almost 1900 of these tickets were about bugs and technical issues, which means Beta is doing a great job! On average the support requests were answered in less than 3 hours and you seemed to be very content with the help of our support team, giving us well above a 4-out-of-5 star rating. To be able to keep up with the bug reports and to be able to add new information to our Wiki more quickly, we hired a few extra team members, increasing our total Beta team from 11 to 13 team members this year.

This year on Beta we found over 350 bugs in total, of which we were able to fix over 320! In total we credited over 40.000 diamonds for bug reports last year! Also, August was the busiest month in terms of bug reports we've have so far.

On our forums we had over 1950 monthly active users on average, which is an increase of 300 active users on a monthly basis. March was this year's busiest month with over 2600 active users. Over 13500 posts have been made this year, with 1847 in the highest month, February. All these posts have been liked more than 9750 times. More than 1700 threads were created. More than 425 members have registered for our forums in the last year, with August as the peak month (85 registrations), probably because of our new Ingame News system which directed more users to our forums

In Closing
It's been another eventful year at Elvenar Beta and for Elvenar in general. We introduced 2 Guest Races (Sorcerers & Dragons and Halflings), a bunch of new events, the new Ingame News window, Fellowship Adventures and finally our mobile version is ready and available all around the globe! On Elvenar Beta we continued to deliver great quality bug reports, allowing us to fix a lot of bugs even before they would hit our Live servers. Your feedback has also been of great value. We're very proud of the dedicated community we have on Beta and would like to take this opportunity to thank you all once again for sharing your thoughts, ideas, concerns and feedback and for helping us making this the best possible game!

I'd also like to give special thanks to our amazing team of Game Moderators who answer all your support tickets and requests with a lot of patience (and not all of these tickets are equally friendly ), our QA Moderators who are doing a great job trying to reproduce all the bugs, add correct reproduction steps and check the bug fixes, our Forum Moderators who take the time to guide you, answer your questions and make sure our forum is a nice and friendly environment and our Wiki Moderators who work very hard to get all the new and changed information in our world wide wikis as soon as possible.

The only thing left for me to say, is that I'm both happy and proud to be your Community Manager and I'd like to thank each and every one of you for the amazing year we had and for all your contributions. On behalf of our entire team, we wish you very pleasant holidays and a wonderful and magical 2018!

Kind regards,
Your Elvenar Beta Team